The Glorious Empire of Ants
                                      
   Ants are among the most social organisms on earth, that much is
   well-known. We don't have any idea just how organized they are.
   
   Consider these facts:
     * In the Amazon rain forest, one hectare of soil contains more than
       eight million ants.
     * Ants make up 10 to 15 percent of the entire animal biomass in most
       terrestrial environments.
     * Ants have been found to thrive in such inhospitable regions as
       Death Valley and Antarctica.
     * Using dozens of pheromone (chemical scent) secretions, ants
       communicate in a surprisingly sophisticated language.
     * Ants are resistant to hard radiation.
     * An ant colony can be considered a super-organism, with individual
       ants the rough approximation of cells.
     * A single colony, such as the Formica yessensis supercolony on the
       Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido, can contain as many as 306 million
       workers and one million queens living in 45,000 interconnected
       nests.
       
   It should not surprise anyone that recent studies indicate ants are
   not only cognizant of human affairs, but participate actively in them.
   A recently unclassified CIA document reports that 25% of hostile
   corporate takeovers in America are paid for by ants. Even more
   shocking is the revelation that much of the world's weapons-grade
   plutonium production in the past three decades was funded by ants.
   
   Most biologists refute the claims of a conspiracy masterminded by
   social insects, but how are we to explain last year's drive-by
   shooting assassination of Oswald H. Larvey, one-time Senior
   Investigator for the CIA and leading expert on covert ant affairs? His
   research in ant supercolonies has provided us with rare photographic
   evidence of the Ants' intent to usurp our civilization, such as the
   stockpiles of ammunition found in colonies on Africa's Ivory Coast.
   And how are we to shrug off the fact that the 1994 Middle East Peace
   Conference in Turkey was postponed indefinitely when thousands of ants
   poured out of the briefcases of top officials? Why has the White House
   budget for insect pest control tripled since last year?
   
   As ants innocently scamper across our sidewalks, few of us stop to
   think that our destruction may be germinating deep under our homes and
   streets. But the numbers are overwhelmingly in favor of ants. They are
   in our offices and our kitchen cupboards, observing us and waiting.
   
   The Ants, Bert Holldobler and Edward Wilson, 1990, Belknap Press,
   Cambridge, MA.